After seven days of this, I was feverish and strange. We rode all day long, but at every stop I was impatient to move on. At night I would walk up and down the camp, putting off the moment of sleep. But sleep always came, and would not be resisted. I began to bleed, too, Which is natural enough with all creatures that carry a womb, yet it had not happened before with me, and it was painful and distressing.
Besides, I feared this fertile womanhood. I knew none of the methods of contraception my race had clearly understood. As for the bandit women, what they did was quite absurd, and achieved nothing, except, I suppose, to keep some witch or other from starving. I did not want to conceive. Any child would have been a misfortune then, and Darak’s seed—a bandit brat, tying me perhaps forever to a life that was not mine—was unthinkable. I did not know what to do. I simply willed myself into barrenness, wildly and hotly, whenever I thought of it.
It was on the ninth day that we came to the city.
“Is this Ankurum?” I asked Barak.
My eyes were swimming with the fever and the heat haze, and I seemed to see on the horizon white walls and towers, and vistas of many buildings behind them.
“No,” he said, “we’re days from Ankurum yet.”
Maggur said: “That’s a ruin, Imma. Only a ruin.”
“Some of the Plains tribes call it Kee-ool,” Darak said. “That means Evil One. They keep away from it, and from the road, or we’d have had company long ago. A place to suit you, goddess.”
There was always a little poison ready in him when he was unsure of me, but I hardly heard what they said.
“We pass through it?” I asked.
“Yes. The road goes through.”
“Then stop there, Darak.”
He grinned without any good humor. “We have the time,” he said.
It was late afternoon when we reached it. Perhaps we would have stopped here anyway, although some of the men muttered and grumbled. They took out their amulets, and kissed and shook mem, but they did not come to Darak asking to go on. Their leader did not fear Kee-ool, they thought, and would laugh at them. Though Darak was edgy, and did not like this place. Truly, there seemed to be something miasmic about it, apparent even to an unimaginative man.
On either side of the paved way, it stretched for miles toward the dim mauve shapes of what must be hills or low mountains. The buildings, or what remained of them, were very white, bleached like bones by the sun. They were like bones in other things, too, the way they stood, gaping, the rib cases and skulls of palaces, joints of pillars, leaning, fallen. There was no color except for the odd vine or weed with flowers that had struggled through to crawl in and out. The land in its eternal brownness, the sky soaking into carnal scarlet, were only a backdrop, something additional, as if the city had stood in space a long while before earth and air formed around it.
I was not sure why I needed to go into it. It was not here that I remembered from my brief childhood how many centuries ago.
I sat in my hard-won place in Darak’s tent, while he and his captains drank around their calendar. It was a primitive colorful thing of carved and painted wood. On it, every season, month, and day had a symbol.
Late summer was a golden frog, and now they were ringing the day which was an owl, for this was the time they had arranged with the Plains tribes for their first selling of weapons.
“Madness to let go fine stuff like this on those savages. They’ll pick their teeth and cut up apples with it.”
The man spat. Arrogance here too, then, in the hierarchy of human standing. But I was hardly listening.
They passed me the beer jug from time to time, and I occasionally drank to symbolize my involvement. I said nothing.
When the tent emptied, Darak stretched out on the rug bed, and looked at me.
“Well? When are you leaving to wander in Kee-ool?”
“When the moon is up,” I said.
“Wake me,” he said. “I’ll sleep off this beer now, and come with you.”
“I must go alone.”
“Don’t be a fool. Wild animals run loose in that place; men too, perhaps as nasty-minded as my own. I know you can fight, and you’re no sniveling idiot of a woman, but remember the ford.”
“I remember it,” I said. “Sleep then. I will wake you.”
He was already drowsy with the drink, he had taken such a lot of it, as he always did. Otherwise he would never have believed me. I went to sit by him, and watched him slip into sleep. He was a beautiful man to look at, even sleeping. He slept like an animal, lightly but serenely, his mouth firmly closed, his body twitching sometimes, and his hands and feet, like the paws of an animal, dreaming. I kissed his face, and left the tent. It was twilight, starlit and quiet, except where men were drinking and making a lot of noise at the fires. They were louder than usual as if to defeat the heavy silence of the place. Only the wind made sounds, thin and rasping, as it piped through holes and empty rooms.
3
I left them behind me very soon. The firelight melted away, and the raucous singing that had started up.
Only the wind now, thilling through stone, sushing through the dust. Darkening landscape, the whiteness a darker whiteness, picked out in starlight. I had an hour, perhaps, before the moon rose.
It was easy to walk down the endless straight streets. Only here and there was the drum of a fallen pillar which must be climbed over. A few little scatterings of small animal fright away from me, but there did not seem to be many living things in this dead city, after all. All around were the shells of palaces. It was a city of palaces, and their gardens and pools and groves and statues and places of pleasure. There could be no lesser building in such a hive of opulent contempt. I walked up cracked marble steps to a high platform where two or three pillars still stood, but nothing else. I looked back and saw the little gleam of the firelit camp, faint and far off—farther than it was, it seemed, as though a semi-transparent curtain shut the city away from it.
Ahead, beneath the platform, great terraces fell down to an oval space—some huge open theater. I walked down toward it, across narrower streets, then in at the vast arched doorway, carved with shapes of women and animals. Steps led upward to the terraces, other steps led downward. The wind brought me a faint odor from the descent that could not still be there—musky darkness, and fear. I went up instead, to the top tier. Marble seats, aisled, each with their columns and carvings. The staircases which ran down between them toward the oval floor were laid with colored stones, red and brown and green and gold. I stopped. Dimly, softly, I heard their voices around me. I turned, and they had come, but only as ghosts. Many men and women and their children, friends, and lovers. Their clothes were a ghostly pastel of scarlets and purples and white. Canopies dripped gold tassels, house banners floated. I looked toward the oval space—and the colors hardened around me, brighter and closer, and the sounds rose above the wind. Below, a green fire was opening like a flower. It shifted and spread itself around the arena, and took shape. A forest of flame, glittering and shimmering. Trees rose from it, with trunks of emerald, branches opening into fiery stars. Fountains burst out of the ground, and a white mist rippled like gauze, threading through everything. It was beautiful and incredible. A little applause stirred among the audience. It seemed I was one of them, aware of cool silk on my body, diamonds, a man’s fingers caressing on my breast until I brushed them off, not wanting my attention diverted.